Google's secret project to build a censored Chinese search engine bypassed the company's own security and privacy teams

Google's Project Dragonfly is a formerly secret project to build a surveilling, censored version of its search engine for deployment in China; it was kept secret from the company at large during the 18 months it was in development, until an insider leak led to its existence being revealed in The Intercept.

According to named and anonymous senior googlers who worked on the project and spoke to The Intercept's Ryan Gallagher, the secrecy was motivated by the fear that googlers would object to the project so passionately that it would be scuttled (another controversial project, Project Maven, would have provided AI services to the Pentagon's drone project, but the internal outcry was so intense that it was killed and the CEO of Google's cloud division resigned in disgrace).

They were right to be scared. The existence of the project triggered mass protests from inside Google, with waves of resignations (including at the highest levels).

Today's report in The Intercept reveals the great and unethical lengths Project Dragonfly's leadership went to to slip the project past the company's rank-and-file, and its founders.

Yonatan Zunger -- a respected security researcher -- was on the Dragonfly team, but subsequently quit to work for a startup. He says he would have quit anyway, because of irregularities in the planning and execution of Project Dragonfly.

The Intercept puts the blame for Dragonfly on Google China Operations Head Scott Beaumont, whom sources (including Zunger) say systematically excluded the privacy and security teams from Dragonfly meetings, misleading them about support from Google founders for the project, and keeping them from sharing their research and recommendations from Beaumont's bosses. Read the rest